9: India and the Two Faces of Political Mobilization

Sten Widmalm is Professor
of Political Science at the Department of Government, Uppsala University.
He has carried out extensive research on political tolerance, democracy
and conflict in South Asia. Currently he is leading the TOLEDO-project
which focuses on political tolerance and democracy in a comparative
perspective in parts of South Asia, Africa and Europe. His publications
include Political Toleranse in the Global South – Images
from India, Pakistan and Uganda (2016) Decentralisation,
Corruption and Social Capital – From India to the West (2008) and Kashmir
in Comparative Perspective (2002, 2006).

The reflections in this book1A big ‘thank you’
to Sven Oskarsson, Frida Widmalm, and Bernard Vowles for creative
suggestions and comments on this text. Also to the members of the
working group ‘Dysfunktioner i statsapparaten’ [Dysfunctions in
the apparatus of state], which met at the annual conference of the
Swedish Political Science Association, 2010. I am also grateful
for the financial support from the Swedish Research Council and
the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA).
Finally, this author is also very grateful for the impressive efforts
made by the editors of this book to publish this manuscript. on
trends, tendencies and various features of the Indian political
landscape do not lend themselves easily to delivering a coherent
rating of Indian democracy. The contributions provide differing
illustrations, examples and specimens of what Indian democracy stands
for, what it has achieved and what it still has to live up to. What
is common to all the contributions is that the phenomena that are
analysed affect Indian democracy in one way or the other. In this
chapter, therefore, I wish to hold up a kind of mirror to India’s
democracy. What challenges do we see if we discuss the influence
of Indian democracy on itself?

A question that is often asked is whether India has the ‘right’
qualities for a democratic regime to function effectively. After
brief reflection on the way the question is posed, one detects an
unexpressed suspicion that India ought not to survive at all, either
as a nation or as a democracy.2Barrington Moore, Social
Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy – Lord and Peasant in the Making
of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993). Against
the background of some of the challenges described in this book,
the following questions are reasonable: Is Indian democracy sustainable?
Does the country have enough middle class, literate, female and
low-caste people in politics, a high enough average income and so
on, to give liberal values buoyancy? Sometimes researchers and debaters
turn the question around and wonder whether India’s democracy creates the
‘right’ conditions in the country for long-term development. When
can India create some kind of basic welfare for all its citizens?
Can democracy bring justice, economic growth and political
stability at the same time? In discussing these questions, the issue
automatically arises: Is Indian democracy itself creating the preconditions for its own long-term survival?

On the one hand, India is a country that has disproved many common
conceptions of what constitutes good conditions for a democratic
form of government. Despite innumerable administrative failings,
low literacy and poverty, the country has succeeded unusually well
in mobilizing its voters. There is in India today a strong popular
adherence to the view that the citizens have the right to choose
their own leaders. One manifestation of this is the high electoral
turnout of around 60 per cent since the 1960s. Only for a period
of twenty-one months in the 1970s did a political elite3By
political elite, in this chapter and in this context, I mainly refer
to leaders of political parties that win elections, bureaucrats
and military officers positioned at high levels of authority within their
own organizations, and representatives of large commercial interests
and businesses. For an intriguing discussion on the theoretical
aspects of the concept, see Alan Zuckerman, ‘The Concept “Political
Elite” – Lessons from Mosca and Pareto’ The Journal of Politics 39,
no. 2 (1977). succeed in totally blocking the democratic
process at the national level (discussed in greater detail later).
From this point of view, democracy has succeeded extremely well,
if India is compared to other countries that were colonized and
have long been burdened by poverty.

On the other hand, a high electoral turnout, implying a high
degree of political mobilization, in a country still struggling
with widespread poverty and a weak or corrupt bureaucracy, is far
from unproblematic. Therefore, the aim here is to note some of the
specific challenges facing the country, given that we, from a normative
standpoint, favour democracy as a form of government. For even if
the most pessimistic predictions have not yet been fulfilled, it
is impossible to disregard the problems that arise, as Atul Kohli
pointed out so well twenty-five years ago, when the masses are mobilized
while at the same time the institutions of government are weak.4Atul
Kohli, Democracy and Discontent (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990). If one considers that many of
those who have become more politically active during the last two decades
are motivated by issues relating to ethnicity and religious belonging,
it becomes even more urgent to re-examine the problems. There is
a risk of erosion and disappearance of political tolerance in strongly
polarized societies. Issues relating to tolerance have been intensely
debated in 2015, but here we will have a slightly more narrow approach
to this topic. By political tolerance is meant here the will and
inclination to put up with groups and opinions that we ourselves
do not like.5Sten Widmalm, Political Tolerance
in the Global South – Images from India, Pakistan and Uganda (London:
Ashgate, 2016 [in press]); Samuel A. Stouffer, Communism,
Conformity, and Civil Liberties – a Cross-Section of the Nation
Speaks Its Mind (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, [1955] 1963);
John L. Sullivan, James Piereson, and George E. Marcus, Political
Tolerance and American Democracy (Chicago and London: The
University of Chicago Press, 1982); James Gibson and Amanda Gouws, Overcoming
Intolerance in South Africa: Experiments in Democratic Persuasion (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). If we agree that this aspect is essential to a functioning
democracy then we can see the danger manifested in the political
climate of India today.

The question to be asked is under what circumstances the mobilization
of Indian electorates will have a negative effect on democracy.
But as mobilization alone can hardly be said to constitute a problem,
we have to see the phenomenon in relation to other factors.

Understanding Democratic Development in India

The relationship between democracy and desirable societal development
is one of the most intensely discussed issues in the social sciences.
When India crops up in this discussion, it is often because examples
are found here that turn common perceptions upside down. For example,
the school of modernization may be mentioned, which is based largely
on the idea that economic growth is a necessary prerequisite for
democracy.6Seymour Martin Lipset, ‘Some Social Requisites
of Democracy – Economic Development and Political Legitimacy,’ The
American Political Science Review 53, no. 1 (1959). Barrington
Moore developed this view and was quick to make a pessimistic forecast
of India’s prospects after Independence.7Moore, Social
Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy – Lord and Peasant in the
Making of the Modern World. It is true that from
Independence onwards until the 1980s, the Indian economy did not
do well. Economists spoke in deprecating terms of what they called
the ‘Hindu rate of growth’. As long as economic growth was only
two or three per cent, the broad-based middle class that social
scientists asserted was a necessary prerequisite for a democracy
was unable to emerge. A weak economy and low literacy levels and the
extremely uneven distribution of the few resources that existed,
handicapped Indian democracy.

Experts have also argued a reverse chain of causality.8Kohli, Democracy
and Discontent. How has India’s democratic form
of government been able to promote a kind of development that is desirable
in other ways? On the plus side, it is most frequently mentioned
that it is democracy which has given the country stability and ethnic
peace. The reform of the 1950s, involving the reorganization of
the states of India to coincide to a considerable extent with linguistic
divisions, was particularly conducive to the relatively good outcome.
When the size of the population and the degree of poverty are borne
in mind, it is possible to claim that India has experienced relatively few ethnic
conflicts. To understand how India has managed to stay united, Paul Brass has contradicted the assumption we
often make, that heterogeneous societies have more conflict than
homogeneous ones. He does not regard the threat to India as arising
from the heterogeneous nature of the country. On the contrary, he
says, this is one of the country’s stabilizing factors.9Paul
R. Brass, Ethnicity and Nationalism (Delhi: Sage,
1991), pp. 342–3. When a country contains so many ethnic
groups, languages, religions, social groupings, etc., it is in theory
impossible for one group to entirely dominate another. But even
if the observation deserves consideration, one wonders whether it
really can be so simple. Is it a misreading to assume that contradictions
in India will solve themselves since no one group, in the long term,
can dominate the country alone? We will return to this idea at the end
of this chapter and compare it with other conclusions about the
patterns of mobilization in India. For there are many factors here
that confuse the picture.

It is necessary to raise the question of why during certain periods
there has been widespread violence in India where factions have
formed on ethnic lines. Atul Kohli in Democracy and Discontent,
for example, has convincingly shown how the demand for government
services in India tends to outstrip the supply.10Kohli,
op. cit. When the gap between supply and demand becomes
too wide, there is no longer any room for political tolerance, and
the result is often politically motivated violence, insurrection
and sometimes pure ethnic persecution. Soon after Kohli published his
book, the occurrence of serious conflict between Hindus and Muslims
in the country increased. To some extent, the conflict was fuelled
largely by the Hindutva movement. But it also arose from the fact
that the state apparatus was weak, politicized and corrupt, entirely
in accordance with Kohli’s analysis.

Three factors that can explain this effect on democracy need
to be highlighted in this context. The first is that the supply
of government services is not always something measurable in such
coarse terms as levels of expenditure. If we want to understand
the role of the government and of different institutions in how
conflicts arise or can be avoided, we have to take note of the
way in which services are provided.11For support
of this argument see Bo Rothstein, The Quality of Government (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 2011). Are government services
and provisions fair, clientelistic, efficient, complicated, etc.?
A weak state apparatus increases the risk of conflict. The important role
that the character of the government plays in development
was stressed by Gunnar Myrdal in Asian Drama and
subsequently, by a number of experts in development and administration.12Gunnar Myrdal, Asiatiskt
drama – En undersökning om nationernas fattigdom
– Arbetskraftens utnyttjande, 3 vols., vol. 3 (Stockholm:
Utrikespolitiska Institutet, Rabén & Sjögren, 1968); Asiatiskt
drama – En undersökning om nationernas fattigdom – Ekonomiska och
sociala problem i sydasien, 3 vols., vol. 2 (Stockholm:
Utrikespolitiska Institutet, Rabén & Sjögren, 1968); Asiatiskt
drama – En undersökning om nationernas fattigdom – Politiska problem
i sydasien, 3 vols., vol. 1 (Stockholm: Utrikespolitiska
Institutet, Rabén & Sjögren, 1968). Here, dysfunctional
apparatuses of the state in the developing world are designated
‘soft’ when weighed down by corruption and clientelism. Going further
back in time, the idea that institutions play a role in how a society
is shaped, in general, and in determining the degree of political
tolerance between the citizens, in particular, was first clearly
expressed by the writers of the American Constitution – especially
James Madison, who played a key role in formulating the American
Declaration of Rights and who made sure that the US Constitution
incorporated the principles of ‘checks and balances’.

The second factor is the role of the political leadership, who
play an important part in determining whether people are mobilized
under populistic and intolerant banners. Political leaders are not
only ‘structural dopes’ – actors whose actions are determined solely
by socioeconomic and cultural conditions, institutions, norms and
rules – but also actors who can function autonomously.13This
widely used termed is more clearly defined in Anthony Giddens, Central
Problems in Social Theory – Actions, Structure and Contradictions
in Social Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1979), p. 52. Also see Torben Bech Dyring, The Circular
Structure of Power – Politics, Identity, Community (London:
Verso, 1997), p. 137; David Rubinstein, Culture, Structure
and Agency – toward a Truly Multidimensional Sociology (Thousand
Oaks: Sage, 2001), p. 14. They can choose to mobilize
for short-term economic gain and employ confrontational strategies.
Or they may choose to plan for economic development that is sustainable
in the long term and bank on political strategies that pour oil
on the troubled waters of pluralistic and infected societies.

The third factor is the people themselves. They may be educated,
prosperous, well-travelled and well-informed about political processes.
Such citizens will probably have a greater chance of acting more
tolerantly towards members of society who act differently, and express
differing views in comparison with poorly educated and impoverished
individuals who have never had direct contact with other political
groupings or cultures.

The three factors stated above are important to understand why
political mobilization of the population sometimes favours democracy
and why it can also turn against democracy. This article is not
meant to whip up fear of what in the past – even
during the democracy debate of Mill’s time in the mid-nineteenth
century – was called mob rule. It aims to discuss the real problems
that arise when political actors mobilize the masses with a message
of intolerance, and democratic institutions cannot protect the rights
of the individual.

The subject of mass mobilization has been dealt with in many
critical studies and it is worthwhile here to recollect some of
them. John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville were concerned
about the unbridled mobilization of the citizenry – what they called
‘political mass participation’. To prevent it from getting out of hand
– from mobilization of the masses to the mob, so to speak, it was
necessary for the people’s level of education to be raised, and
for them to be socialized in the democratic rules of the game by
participating in politics.14Sullivan, Piereson, and Marcus, Political
Tolerance and American Democracy, pp. 13–14, 15. James
Madison averred that the constitution and government institutions
should be so designed as to avoid the tyranny of the majority.15James
Madison, ‘The Structure of the Government Must Furnish the Proper
Checks and Balances between the Different Departments,’ The
Federalist no. No. 51 (1788), http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa51.htm.
Access date 2013-10-02. By enshrining rights in the Constitution
and dividing power between different institutions – the parliament,
the executive and the courts – it was possible to safeguard the
rights of the weak and also channel interests so that they could
not easily gang up against just one group in society. Nevertheless, the
possibility remains of a political elite exploiting groups in society
that may have found themselves outside the establishment. They can
be utilized in populist movements and be moulded into the core of
an entirely authoritarian movement. It is the masses that
Hannah Arendt describes as particularly difficult to handle or even
dangerous to the life of a democracy.

About the masses and those who were mobilized
in the authoritarian regimes of the 1930s and 1940s in Europe, Arendt
writes:

It was characteristic of the rise of the Nazi movement
in Germany and of the Communist movement in Europe after 1930 that
they recruited their members from this mass of apparently indifferent
people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too
stupid for their attention. The result was that the majority of
their membership consisted of people who never before had appeared
on the political scene. This permitted the introduction of entirely
new methods into political propaganda, and indifference
to the argument of political opponents; these movements
not only placed themselves outside and against the party system
as a whole, they found a membership that had never before been reached,
never been ‘spoiled’ by the party system. Therefore they did not need to refute opposing arguments and
consistently preferred methods which ended in death rather than
persuasion, which spelled terror rather than conviction. They presented
disagreements as invariably originating in deep natural, social,
or psychological sources beyond the control of the individual and
therefore beyond the power of reason. This would have been a shortcoming
only if they had sincerely entered into competition with other parties;
it was not if they were sure of dealing with people who had reason
to be equally hostile to all parties.16H. Arendt, Totalitarianism (Orlando,
Florida: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1968), pp. 9–10 (my italics).

Notwithstanding Arendt’s well-formulated ideas on who represented
the driving force in the tyrannical Nazi and Communist regimes, the
masses have almost disappeared as an analytical category
in recent times. William Kornhauser tried to develop the concept
into a theory, but in the 1970s, the term began to be regarded as
basically unusable or politically incorrect.17W. Kornhauser, The
Politics of Mass Society (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1960). It was felt to express disdain for the common
people. But is this criticism fair to Arendt? Is it of use to us
ourselves if we care about the democratic form of government? Let
us see whether there are nevertheless, characteristics that Arendt
describes in the amorphous political entity of the masses that
are pertinent to our analysis. Latter day events in Europe bear
witness to the continued relevance of her viewpoint. In Ian Buruma’s Murder in
Amsterdam, Theo van Gogh’s murderer Mohammed Bouyeri is
described as a ‘radical loser’. The term is borrowed from an essay
by Hans Magnus Enzensberger and refers to individuals in modern
society who have found themselves outside the labour market and
normal social networks, and who have finally found support in intolerant
radical ideologies.18Hans Magnus Enzensberger, ‘The Terrorist
Mindset – the Radical Loser,’ Spiegel Online, 20 December,
2006. The profile described can fit Bouyeri as well as
those who are today attracted to the xenophobic ultra nationalist
Sweden Democrats, Jobbik in Hungary, or Golden Dawn in Greece. And
from here perhaps we can draw a parallel to Arendt and then onwards
to those actors who take part in conflicts in India. The sum total
of this is that radical losers crop up in all sorts of places and
that they are always easy prey for populist leaders. They can in certain
circumstances have a big effect on politics by being brought together
under a populist message and acting in a manner contrary to all
that the deliberative democratic model stands for.

To sum up, in the very brief exposition of political mobilization
in India that follows we shall bear in mind the following actors,
which together seem to be having a decisive effect on the outcome
for democracy when the population is mobilized.19One does
not have to be a Marxist to ask where capital and the companies
are placed in this model. Obviously, economic development plays
a big part in the development of tolerance or conflict. But in this
model, it is implicitly present as an underlying factor that influences
and directs individuals, political elites, and the actions of the
state, even if they can act autonomously. Other such underlying
factors are historical context, cultural values, position in the greater
international political context, etc.

Figure 9.1: Players interacting for and against democracy

The division of actors and structures is accepted in many analyses
of political processes, but here it is particularly relevant because
a consistent theme is the degree of tolerance in society. In Political
Tolerance and American Democracy, Sullivan et al. observe
that different ideologies have had differing views about which actors contribute
to intolerant movements, and how actors can help to counter intolerance.20Sullivan,
Piereson, and Marcus, Political Tolerance and American Democracy. Conservative
democratic theoreticians pin their hopes on the enlightened elites
in society. Liberal democratic theoreticians also rely on the enlightened elites
but they add that well-educated citizens are also key to a tolerant
society, where equal democratic rights are respected. Mill and de
Tocqueville were particularly concerned
about ‘mass political involvement’. But education and socialization
by participation would bring order to this. Federalist democratic
theoreticians, such as James Madison, rely neither on elites nor
on citizens. It is the state and its institutions and how they channel
interests that determine whether a society is tolerant or not. Just
as these actors may represent solutions, so also can they be the
cause of problems that arise with political mobilization. A brief
account of India’s complex history with regard to different kinds
of political mobilization, focusing on the roles played by the political
elites, the state and its institutions, and the citizenry, is useful
to highlight some of the major challenges faced by Indian democracy.
The idea is to provide a few examples to illustrate the different
and dynamic aspects of the mobilization processes that lead to diverging
outcomes, where the factor or factors mentioned have played a central
role. Such an account can also point out some of today’s greatest
challenges to Indian democracy.

Mobilization for Indian Democracy

The obvious objections to the assumptions underlying the design
of this chapter would perhaps be: how can anyone not approve of
mass mobilization in India? Mass mobilization has surely been the
basis for India’s liberation and has, after all, formed the basis
for the many popular movements that have questioned the authoritarian
tendencies of the state. Let us consider this perspective first.

Mobilization for Indian Democracy

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Indian soldiers, both
Hindu and Muslim, took part in a revolt against the British East
India Company, which came to be known as the Sepoy Uprising.21David
Saul, The Indian Mutiny (Viking, 2002). The
incident resulted in the British Crown taking over the administration
of the British Empire in India. The revolt, which was enormous in
extent, included not only the soldiers recruited by the East India
Company but also the civilian population.22Stephen Howe,
‘"The Indian Mutiny" by Saul David – Forgotten Horrors of the British
Raj,’ The Independent, 16 October 2002. It
is not surprising that the revolt is regarded in India as ‘India’s
first war of liberation’ against the British. And this mass mobilization
paved the way for continued resistance to outside oppression.

Early in the twentieth century there followed one of the most
spectacular displays of mass mobilization that the world had ever
seen when India once again rose up against
the British Empire. Obviously, some nationalist leaders, such as Subhash
Chandra Bose from Bengal, advocated militant opposition to the colonial rulers.23L.
A. Gordon, Bengal: The Nationalist Movement 1876–1940 (Delhi:
Manohar, 1979). But it was a movement based on non-violence
and civil disobedience that made the great breakthrough. This movement
was led by the Congress Party, with Jawaharlal Nehru as its political
leader, but most of the spiritual and ideological inspiration came
from Mohandas Karamchand, or ‘Mahatma’ (great soul) Gandhi. He recommended
‘Satyagraha’ – a kind of passive resistance that proved hugely effective
in winning both a strategic and moral advantage over the British.
It began with boycotts of British goods and British education and
a refusal to pay tax. The latter acquired enormous symbolic significance
when the Indians were urged to produce their own salt to avoid taxation
by the British. In 1930, Gandhi walked four hundred kilometres,
from Ahmedabad to the coastal town of Dandi, joined by thousands
of Indians protesting the British rule by making their own salt
from seawater. The protesters soon included millions of Indians
from all strata of society and eventually Independence became a
reality.

However, the tradition of large-scale protests and mass mobilization
did not disappear with liberation. Indira Gandhi gave an impressive
demonstration of mass mobilization forty years after the salt march.
As Indira Gandhi had lost a significant part of her institutional
capital after the Indian National Congress had split in the end
of the 1960s, she was obliged to adopt a new political strategy.
She decided to mobilize the masses by appealing to them directly.
Before the election of 1971, she promised that poverty would be
eradicated. ‘Garibi hatao’ became a slogan that
had enormous impact, particularly on the poorer voters. The underlying
strategy came to involve an important change for the Congress Party.
Previously the party had been a ‘catch-all’ party – an organization
that picked up support from virtually all groups in society, or
as Rajni Kothari has described it, a kind of microcosm of the whole
of India.24Rajni Kothari, Politics in India (Himayatnagar:
Orient Longman, 1970). Arend Lijphart builds on this description
when he describes India as a ‘consociational democracy’. See Arend Lijphart,
‘The Puzzle of Indian Democracy: A Consociational Interpretation,’ American
Political Science Review 90, no. 2 (1996). But
now, Indira Gandhi was compelled to bypass both the old caste elites
in the countryside and the middle class in the cities. Within ten
years, the Congress Party lost its ‘catch-all’ character.25Christophe
Jaffrelot, India's Silent Revolution – the Rise of the Lower
Castes of India (London: C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers)
Ltd., 1988). But to win the 1971 election it proved to
be the right move. Indira Gandhi’s Congress won 44 per cent of the
votes, while the Congress (O) gained 10 per cent before receding
into the background. The electoral victory
was a political and cultural upset without parallel. Partly because
Indira, a woman, succeeded in beating the old elites at their own
game and also because ‘garibi hatao’ came to stand
as a symbolic victory of the poorest, who previously had difficulty
in making their voices heard.

We can find a final example of meaningful democratic mass mobilization
in India in recent times in the protests against the building of
dams in India. Since the 1980s, the Sardar Sarovar dam was the focus
of protest, since it may have displaced between three hundred thousand
and a million people from their homes.26The Narmada project
is actually a number of projects that include dams to be built along
the River Narmada in the states of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and
Gujarat. More about popular protests in India can be found in Katrin
Uba, ‘Do Protests Make a Difference? – the Impact of Anti-Privatisation
Mobilisation in India and Peru’ (Uppsala University, 2007). The
large scale protests against the dams helmed by the organization,
the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save Narmada) was a significant movement
in many respects. Regardless of the consequences of the dam project,
the protests show that Indian democracy is far from being a space
that engages only the elites. Tribal peoples, the largest demography
affected by dams in India, are among the most economically and politically
disadvantaged groups in Indian society. Even if the dam projects
continue, the size of the protests still shows that Indian democracy
lives in the hearts of a population who despite severe socio-economic
disadvantages assert their rights against political elites and outstandingly
strong economic forces.

From these examples, it is apparent that the mobilization of
citizens on a large scale, or ‘mass mobilization’ is central to
Indian democracy. Such mobilization can, undoubtedly, encompass
the most economically disadvantaged and can be of a populist nature.
The ‘garibi hatao’ campaign is an example of this.
Given these circumstances, it is not entirely obvious how one can
convincingly argue that mass mobilization can also pose a threat
to democracy. But unfortunately one can. As is shown by history
and by what Arendt witnessed before and during the Second World
War, mass mobilization is not inevitably beneficial to democratic
development. It can also work in an anti-democratic direction if
those who are mobilized have no intention of letting their political
opponents be heard, and if violence is the means of achieving their
goals. India, like so many other states around the world, also offers
many experiences of the kind.

Mass Mobilization and Tragedy in India

India’s Independence in 1947 also came with the displacement
of millions of Hindus and Muslims from their homes. More than seven
million Muslims fled to Pakistan and equally
many Hindus and Sikhs made their way to India. This gigantic process
of migration gave rise to conflicts that led to the deaths of around
a million people. ‘Liberation’, therefore, is remembered alongside
‘Partition’ and forms one of the most painful moments in the history
of southern Asia. India and Pakistan have still not recovered from
it, and the events around 1947 remain a volatile ground of conflict
between Pakistan and India and have also fuelled intolerance between,
in particular, Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus.27Admittedly, it
would be possible and relevant in this context also to discuss caste
conflict and intolerance based on gender. In these conflicts,
mass mobilization is an important component, where the state and
the political elites exercised a crucial effect on the outcome.
The following four examples illustrate this point.

The garibi hatao campaign had a downside, even
if the purpose was a good one. When Indira Gandhi broke with the
old elites in the Congress Party, she was obliged, as described
previously, to pursue her political struggle without a strong organization.
She appealed directly to the people. This enabled her to circumvent elite
groupings in the states and rule by direct means. For example, it
quickly became customary to use and indeed abuse, the protective
mechanisms in the Indian Constitution that were intended to create
order in the states when there were disturbances. Vaguely expressed
passages in the Constitution were often used to depose regimes at
the state level that were not to her liking. Generally, power was
centralized in New Delhi in a very tangible and authoritarian manner. With
strong electoral results behind her and a closely integrated political
elite surrounding her, there was for a long time nobody to whom
she was answerable. In 1975 Indira Gandhi, locked in a very tight
political corner, introduced a state of emergency that radically
circumscribed the freedom of the press and civil rights. Politicians
who expressed dissatisfaction with the regime were thrown into prison. Even
less did anyone dare to criticize her right-hand man, her son Sanjay
Gandhi, who became increasingly known for implementing Indira’s
will, and his own, with a growing brutality. Here mention may be
made of compulsory sterilizations in the seventies and Sanjay’s
order to clear the slums of the poor in New Delhi using ruthless
methods; these are but two instances.28See for example Katherine
Frank, Indira – the Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi (London:
HarperCollins, 2001). It looked for a while as if India was
going to suffer the same fate as Pakistan. Nonetheless, after 21
months, Indira Gandhi suspended the state of emergency. She and
the Congress (I) lost the following election. However, the opposition
was fragmented and weak, and after another election in 1980, Congress
(I) and Gandhi managed to regain power. Before
the election, Gandhi and her party entered into alliances and collaborations with
other political forces who were prepared to resort to harsh methods
against opponents of Congress (I).

One example is Sanjay Gandhi’s support over a period for the
religious leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale in Punjab. Bhindranwale’s
career was rising as a Sikh missionary preaching strict abstinence
to young, disillusioned and often unemployed men of rural Punjab.
Collaboration with the Congress (I) did not work out well, since
it was soon realized that Bhindranwale had a political agenda in
the direction towards separatism. Soon Bhindranwale led a widespread
populist movement that targeted the Indian government and Congress
(I). They demanded that Punjab be allowed to form its own state,
Khalistan. Soon Bhindranwale and his supporters achieved wide support
in Punjab. He mobilized a kind of mass movement and many of the
displaced farmers and poor young men who joined it were not very
different from some of those described by Arendt.29M. Tully
and S. Jacob, Amritsar (London: Pan Books, 1985).
Also see Gurharpal Singh, Ethnic Conflicts in India – a
Case-Study of Punjab (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2000). Those
who opposed him and his political movement became targets of the
death patrols sent out from the movement’s headquarters, which were
in the sacred Sikh Golden Temple in Amritsar. The conflict escalated
and Indira Gandhi’s attempt to ‘solve’ it was Operation Blue Star,
which involved surrounding the temple with a full military force
and then attacking it. The siege ended in great bloodshed. Bhindranwale
was killed, and his supporters avenged his death less than six months
later by assassinating Indira Gandhi. Congress Party supporters
then took immediate revenge on the Sikhs as a group, especially
in New Delhi. For three or four days there was a frenzied hunt for
Sikhs and more than three, possibly four, thousand Sikhs were killed
in organized pogroms. The conflict in Punjab continued throughout
the 1980s, where democratic institutions were damaged or stopped functioning
entirely. In due course it subsided, only to give way to a growing
conflict in Kashmir, which, too, contained elements of mass mobilization.

Kashmir was disputed at Partition and before the 1980s, India
and Pakistan had already fought three wars specifically about, or
strongly affecting, the area. Kashmir, or ‘Jammu & Kashmir’,
as the Indian-controlled part was called, is special in a number
of ways, including the fact that it is a state with a Muslim majority.
Over the years, Pakistan has often supported separatists in Kashmir
in the hope of gaining control of the Indian-controlled part. But
in the late seventies and early eighties there was hardly any local
support for separatism in Kashmir. Democratic institutions were
functioning relatively well and integration of the area with the rest
of India was proceeding along the right lines from an Indian perspective.
During the 1980s, however, corruption in
Kashmir increased, politicians tried to manipulate elections and
control the judicial system for their own purposes.30Sten
Widmalm, Kashmir in Comparative Perspective – Democracy
and Violent Separatism in India (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2006). When the population lost faith in democratic
institutions, protests increased, as did support for separatists
in the region. The Indian central government chose to meet the discontent
with more restrictions of rights and by imprisoning dissenting political
leaders. Towards the end of the 1980s, mass protests were very common
and the response was sterner military reaction. Before long, almost
all the democratic institutions in Kashmir collapsed and this was
followed by a conflict that has not yet come to an end. It is important
to note that by the end of the 1980s, the young men who had been
mobilized in the conflict were completely disillusioned about democracy
and opportunities for rational and constructive discussion. Years
of corruption and electoral fraud shaped, quite naturally, their
view that it was only with violence that a political struggle could
be continued.31Ibid. What else could they lose?
They had, in a sense, been transformed into radical losers, to revert
to the terminology of Enzensberger. In this case, we can clearly
see how the masses were mobilized and took up rational positions
on account of the actions of the political elites and of weak, politicized
and corrupt institutions.

As the conflict in Kashmir escalated, the Hindu nationalists
in India found more support. It is true that their movement had
begun to grow appreciably during the 1980s, but in the 1990s, the
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the largest party espousing the Hindutva
movement, came to enjoy almost as much support from the electorate
as Congress (I). In its political rhetoric, Muslims were portrayed
as disloyal to India – Kashmir was just one example – and its most
radical representatives were not opposed to the idea of suspending
Muslims’ Indian citizenship. The BJP was remarkably skilful in mobilizing
the masses. One way of doing this was by marches through the country,
for example the BJP’s Ekta Yatra in 1992. This
was led by BJP president Murli Manohar Joshi, and ended in Kashmir
with Joshi hoisting the Indian tricolour in Srinagar to show that
Kashmir was a part of India and would never be relinquished. Given
the conditions in Kashmir at that time, it is understandable that
a symbolic deed of this kind merely exacerbated the conflict at
the local level. Another type of mass mobilization that turned out
well for the BJP was its actions in what is known as the Ayodhya
question. The background to this conflict is described in Chapter
Seven. There, too, we observe a well-organized mobilization of the
masses. Many of these joined the movement as kar sevaks, or voluntary
assistants, who in1992 demolished the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya.

The Ayodhya conflict continues today and still has repercussions
on the political climate of India. This leads us on to the last
example of mass mobilization associated with conflict. In 2002,
a train stopped at a station in the state of Gujarat. The train
contained many Hindu passengers, including several Hindu nationalist activists
returning from Ayodhya after demonstrating for the building of a
temple on the remains of the Ayodhya mosque. One of the carriages
in the train caught fire. The first media reports stated that the
carriage was set on fire by angry Muslims. Later enquiries suggested
that it caught fire after an accident. Fifty-eight Hindus died and
the event set off an extensive pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat, not
unlike the pogrom against Sikhs in New Delhi in 1984. Within the
span of a few days, around one thousand Muslims were killed in the
state, although the exact numbers remain inconclusive. The violence
was extremely brutal and often sexual. According to many reports,
it was led by Hindu nationalists and sanctioned by political elites
in the state, including the Chief Minister Narendra Modi. In the
subsequent election in the state, Modi and the BJP won a decisive
victory.32Pankaj Mishra, ‘The Gujarat Massacre – New India’s
Blood Rite,’ in The Guardian (14 March, 2012). Later,
in 2014, Modi became the Prime Minister of India.

Democratic and Anti-democratic Mobilization in India

From these examples, it is easy to confirm that the kinds of
contexts in which mobilization with democratic or anti-democratic
overtones has arisen are specific to India. However, this does not
mean that the dynamics and the patterns we can observe are unique
or of an unusual kind. Let us return to the discussion at the start of
this chapter and take a closer look at the population, the political
leadership and the institutions to examine the role they play in
the varied outcomes.

The Responsibility of the Political Elite

Political leaders around the world are seldom averse to taking
personal credit when their own political campaigns are successful
from a democratic perspective. This view is reflected in the depiction
of political leaders as the founders of the nation in portraits
and statues, and in the writing of biographies of the ‘great leaders’.
When things go wrong, the responsibility of the individual leaders
seldom receives the same proclamation – at least not from themselves.
Suddenly it becomes necessary to understand
‘structures’ – such as the laws, the constitution, the economic
situation, etc.

It is obvious that institutions, conventions, unwritten and written
systems of rules and so on, can lead, and even force, political
leaders to adopt positions and strategies that polarize groups in
an anti-democratic direction. It is difficult to blame a party which
resorts to arms after being harassed and suffering drastic restrictions
of freedom over a long period. We can see elements of this process
in Kashmir and Punjab. At the same time, it is wrong to exonerate
political leaders in every situation that leads to conflict. Perhaps
the leaders could have acted differently. Perhaps they could have
implemented conciliatory strategies in critical situations. As well
as cases that are difficult to assess from a perspective of responsibility,
there are many examples of conflict stirred up by politicians whose main
concern has been to maximize their personal power and influence.
Conflict may then arise as an unforeseen consequence. Sometimes
polarization is an expression of a desire for revenge, or of an
intention to drive out or wipe out another group in the community.
The Kashmir conflict, as it developed in the 1980s and the early
1990s, is an example of a conflict that was not created deliberately.
The Congress Party, and also the strong local party, the National
Conference under the leadership of Farooq Abdullah, pursued a policy
focused solely on maximizing their own influence.33S. Bose, The
Challenge in Kashmir (Delhi: Sage Publications, 1997);
Sumit Ganguly, The Crisis in Kashmir (Cambridge:
Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University Press, 1997);
S. Ganguly, ‘The Crisis of Indian Secularism,’ Journal of
Democracy 14, no. 4 (2003); Ashutosh Varshney, ‘India,
Pakistan, and Kashmir – Antinomies of Nationalism,’ Asian
Survey 31, no. 11 (1991); Widmalm, Kashmir in Comparative
Perspective – Democracy and Violent Separatism in India;
R. G. Wirsing, India, Pakistan and the Kashmir Dispute (Allahabad:
Rupa & Co., 1994). This then led to the politicizing
and/or dismantling of democratic institutions, which resulted in
greater polarization and conflict. So even if armed conflict was
never intended, the major parties and their leaders were to blame.
In the wake of the Ayodhya conflict, we find examples of direct provocation
of Muslims led by a Hindu nationalist elite. The most blatant example is
Gujarat’s Chief Minister Narendra Modi, who is alleged to have sanctioned
the attacks on Muslims in Gujarat in 2002. The fact that instead
of resigning as Chief Minister, he used the attacks as a platform
for re-election, bears witness to dominant views of Muslims as well
as his and the political elite’s cynical exploitation of opportunities
– which continues to constitute a problem for Indian democracy.

It is clear that the political elites have a definite influence
on the patterns of mobilization that may arise among the population.
As mentioned earlier, Paul Brass has pointed
out that pluralism in India strengthens its democracy.34Brass,
op. cit., pp. 342–3. This is true to some extent. If
society contains many different politicians and groupings who are
all making political demands of different kinds all the time, a
pattern of countervailing pressures arises that prevents any groups
from taking over completely. In cases like the Sepoy Uprising and
the Dandi March we saw how large-scale protests mobilized several
groups at the same time against a tyrannical regime. The explicit
joint objective here lay in a democratic direction. But it is equally
possible for political elites to mobilize a larger group, or several
groups together, against one single group.

A kind of tyranny of the majority can then arise. This may mean
that, for example, different caste groupings, which have previously
had differing interests, unite against another group in society,
such as the Muslims. This creates a new identity, a new ‘us and
them’ dimension, and when a minority group finds itself at such
a disadvantage, the consequences may be serious. Government institutions
and the State in general are supposed to resist such a course of
events. But sometimes government institutions fail to act in accordance
with the democratic principles of the state to treat and protect
all its citizens equally. On the contrary, the institutions may
often be a powerful causal factor in the polarizing process.

The Role of Government Institutions in the Mobilization
of Citizens and Interests

The pioneering work of Sullivan et al. on political tolerance
draws attention to James Madison’s perceptive observation that a
state contains a large number of political groups and differing
interests. As long as the structure of the state incorporates well-developed
principles of separation of powers and a decentralized administrative
structure, interests are divided between different levels and are always
to some extent opposed by other interests. This means that no group
can easily achieve total political dominance, and
no group ends up entirely outside the system as a loser.35Sullivan,
Piereson, and Marcus, Political Tolerance and American Democracy,
pp. 19–23. Nor does the federalist model anticipate that
any political group or leader will, to any great degree, stand up
heroically to defend another political group that is subjected to
threats, violence or other activities that curtail its freedom.
This function is the task of the executive power, the legislative
assembly and the judicial system as prescribed in the Constitution
and in its declaration of rights.

These observations are particularly interesting in an Indian
context, because the Indian Constitution envisages a kind of federation
based on rights that finds parallels in the American Constitution
and elsewhere. There are many cases where the Indian Constitution
and the institutions of the Indian state have worked together in
uniting the nation and upholding democracy. The Indian state has never
been as soft-centred as many have imagined after reading Gunnar
Myrdal’s Asian Drama. The language question that
we mentioned initially is an example. It was solved by amending
the Constitution and by the court’s upholding of government directives.
What might have become a prolonged conflict on borders and the status
of the different languages was turned, instead in the 1950s, into
one of the strongest foundations currently supporting the Indian
nation. Furthermore, it was the Constitutional reforms in the early
1990s along with administrative reforms, such as the panchayati
raj reforms, that led to India becoming more decentralized and
gaining a better-functioning democracy with a considerably higher
number of women in politics.36Raghabendra Chattopadhyay
and Esther Duflo, ‘Women as Policy Makers: Evidence from a India-Wide
Randomized Policy Experiment’, Econometrica 72,
no. 5 (2004); Sten Widmalm, Decentralisation, Corruption
and Social Capital – from India to the West (Los Angeles,
London, New Delhi, Singapore: SAGE Publications, 2008).

My own research on the panchayat system in India shows how the
democratic deficit – citizens’ experience of lack of effective democratic
processes – was reduced by decentralizing reforms.37Decentralisation,
Corruption and Social Capital – from India to the West. The
study was carried out in Madhya Pradesh and Kerala during the period
2000–2004. It contains in-depth interviews and questionnaires addressed
to political elites and citizens chosen at random. The study clearly
shows that people believe that democracy functions better since
the decentralizing reforms were carried out. In this respect, the
aforementioned federalist democracy theory receives support. Further
support from the theory emerges from the fact that the study shows
the different effects of the degree of decentralization on the level
of political tolerance among citizens.38Also see Sullivan
et al., op. cit., p. 22, for discussion of decentralization and
tolerance.

There is no doubt that we can see good results for democracy
when government institutions function as intended. Conversely, there
is also considerable criticism of Indian government institutions,
which are often deemed weak and corrupt. It is very easy to show
that many cases of conflict have arisen because of, or have been inflamed
by, India’s dysfunctional institutions. In Kashmir, Gujarat and
Punjab, as we mentioned earlier, corruption in the police force,
the judicial system and the electoral commission, and among politicians,
can be the most important factor contributing
to the flare-up and escalation of conflict. The political elites
who wish to exercise total political domination cannot do this by
military force alone. They have to draw up a hegemony –
to use (Gramsci, 200739Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks,
ed. Joseph A. Buttigieg, vols. I–III, European Perspectives (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2007).). They have to
exercise an appreciable influence on cultural values and norms in
society, and ensure that their own value system is accepted by the
rest of society. This can be done if the elite or elites can control
government institutions for their own interests. There is still
far too much scope for this in India. In democracies where the state
is ‘soft’, there is potential for a dictatorship of the majority.
Undoubtedly, one of the greatest challenges facing democracy in
India is to build a more just and functioning state apparatus and
to avoid a dictatorship of the majority.

Tolerance of the Citizens and the Radical Losers

Finally, it is necessary to put in perspective the role of the
citizens in the mobilization processes. As we have seen, elites
and institutions have a big influence on the direction of democracy.
They can influence citizens and structure their preferences, their feeling
of solidarity, their interpretation of reality, etc. However, first,
not all citizens are affected in the same way by the same information
or incentive structures. Second, the reverse order of causation
is relevant – elites and institutions are often shaped by the pressure
from beneath in the form of the will and methods of expression of
the people. When these take an anti-democratic course, terms such
as ‘mob’ and ‘rabble’ are heard. When they take a democratic or
other more sympathetic course, they are usually called grassroots
movements. But even if the citizens are motivated by widely differing
aims, it is possible to ask whether the underlying dynamics in political
processes are not basically similar. This question is well beyond
the scope of this chapter. But it is worthwhile to provide some
illustrations of how the characteristics of individuals shape political
movements and what may constitute differences that are very important
to democratic development.

There is no shortage of studies supporting the liberal democracy
theory we mentioned at the beginning – stating that not only enlightened
elites but also educated and socially oriented citizens are necessary
for a functioning democracy. A generally high level of education
and high levels of social capital among the population are seen
as either essential or at least conducive to a functioning democracy.40More
modern research which shows the effect of education on the degree
of democracy dates back to John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New
York: The Macmillan Company, 1916). Tolerance research,
in particular, has focused on the importance of education in the development of democratic norms.41At
least from the time of Stouffer onwards. Stouffer, Communism,
Conformity, and Civil Liberties – A Cross-Section of the Nation
Speaks Its Mind. Ideas on the importance of
social capital made, in their early form, their breakthrough with
the modernization theory of the 1950s,42S. M. Lipset, op.
cit.. which also stressed the great significance of education;
they have more recently been revived in the work of Robert Putnam
in the field.43Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy
Work – Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, N.J: Princeton
University Press, 1992).

Modern theories in this area of research have proved particularly
relevant to India.44Ashutosh Varshney, Ethnic Conflict
and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2002); Anirudh Krishna, Active Social
Capital (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Widmalm, Decentralisation,
Corruption and Social Capital – from India to the West. We
know from these that economic activity that involves individuals across
ethnic lines creates trust across boundaries and reduces the risk
of conflict. We also know that literacy breaks down old social hierarchies
and creates new social entrepreneurs in a more equal and therefore,
more democratic social structure. These observations are particularly
interesting, because enthusiasm is often expressed for social capital between groups
in today’s discussion of democratic theory. In such cases, the mafia,
the Ku Klux Klan and criminal motorcycle gangs are cited as examples
of what can happen when groups only nurture trust, networks and
norms within their own group.

At the same time, mobilization within groups need not necessarily
be a bad thing. Trust within groups and internal solidarity are
preconditions for the mobilization of resistance to forces of oppression.
This has been observed in the villages of Madhya Pradesh and Kerala,
and in my opinion, it is also demonstrated in work done by the Narmada
Bachao Andolan.45Decentralisation, Corruption and
Social Capital – from India to the West. They
depend on trust within the group, and it is probable that they have
no great faith in their political opponents. The Narmada Bachao
Andolan is undoubtedly important to democracy. Democracies have
developed on the same lines in the West. High levels of social capital within
groups have been the key to the mobilization of workers, blacks
and women.46‘The Utility of Bonding Social Capital,’ Journal
of Civil Society 1, no. 1 (2005). For instance,
extensive research on intolerance in South Africa shows that strong
identities based on ethnic divisions need not have a negative effect
on democratic values.47J. L. Gibson, ‘Do Strong Group Identities
Fuel Intolerance? Evidence from the South African Case,’ Political
Psychology 27, no. 5 (2006). The conclusion
we can draw from this is that social capital is an important precondition
for the occurrence of political mobilization in whatever form. But social capital itself does
not determine the course that a democracy will take. This is decided
by interaction with factors we have already mentioned, such as the
institutions and the elites. However, that does not mean there are
no differences between citizens who want to mobilize within a democratic
framework and those who resort to non-parliamentary methods to achieve
political influence. I conclude this section by making a few observations
concerning those individuals who seem to have ended up ‘outside’
the democratic system.

Hannah Arendt’s initial description of intolerant citizens who
are mobilized in populist movements is of special interest. She
says that those who were mobilized by the Nazis and the communists
were individuals whom other parties regarded as too crazy or apathetic
to be interesting. They were individuals who had not been mobilized
before and who, more importantly, were indifferent to
the arguments of political opponents. Differences of opinion were
regarded by these citizens as a result of divisions that were so
deep, and also ‘natural’, that it was quite simply not possible
to enter into a rational dialogue. For this reason, these individuals were
more inclined to turn to violence to attain political success. They
were people who had been placed, or had placed themselves, outside
the existing political system. So the question then becomes how
this picture fits in with our picture of, for example, radical Hindu
extremists or extreme Islamists in India.

Epithets such as extremists with a religious prefix lead to thoughts
of individuals who practice their religion very ardently, and the
idea that it is the religious belief itself that gives inspiration,
force and motivation to their intolerant or violent behaviour. But
the order of cause and effect is often quite different. It is rather
the case that the most intolerant individuals are people who first
find themselves outside society in some way and that they are then
picked up by a politically radical movement.

In studies that I have been involved in after the above mentioned
research project on decentralization, deeper insights about the
causes behind tolerance have been revealed in India – or more specifically
in the context of Madhya Pradesh. Gender, education, party affiliation
and age seem to have no relationship to political tolerance. The
politicized curriculum seems to block the positive effects of education
on political tolerance, which is commonly observed elsewhere. Those who
do engage in party activities, or membership in NGO-activities and
unions, are however significantly more tolerant than those who do
not.48Widmalm, Political Tolerance in the Global
South – Images from India, Pakistan and Uganda; Sven Oskarsson
and Sten Widmalm, ‘Personality and Political Tolerance – Evidence
from India and Pakistan,’ Political Studies, accepted
(2014); Sten Widmalm and Sven Oskarsson, ‘Political Tolerance in
India – Descriptions and Explanations from the Heartland,’ Asian
Survey 53, no. 3 (2013). Perhaps this is expected but what was surprising was that those
showing strong trust in their own group were no more intolerant
than those showing trust across group boundaries.49This
result is in line with finding by Gouws and Gibson in South Africa.
Gibson and Gouws, Overcoming Intolerance in South Africa:
Experiments in Democratic Persuasion. It is
quite common in the discourse on social capital to emphasize the
positive effects that trust extends across group identities. Trust
mainly within groups is often regarded as detrimental to democracy.
Also it is assumed that trust and political tolerance is almost
the same thing. People are assumed to be politically tolerant towards
those they trust. But the study on decentralization shows that trust and
tolerance are evidently different qualities.

It was perhaps even more surprising to find in the studies mentioned
here that the degree of tolerance, or intolerance, was not correlated
with the inclination to visit temples or, if the person went to
the temple regularly, the frequency of the visits. If various statistical
methods were applied to the survey data it was possible to detect
that in some cases the extremely intolerant respondents went to
the temple more seldom than those who showed themselves to be tolerant.
Apparently, intolerance and religious activism cannot be automatically
equated. What appears, on the other hand, is the picture of men
who are not doing particularly well in life and who are outside
the more established social contexts. They are bitter for various
reasons and do not think ‘other people’, especially those they regard
as different from themselves, should have the same rights as they
believe they themselves should have. They are very close to the
personality type described by Arendt, and this is not, in other
words, unique to the Europe of the 1930s and 1940s. Nor to India
today.

This kind of outsider has been described by
Ian Buruma in his portrait of Mohammed Bouyeri:50Ian Buruma, Murder
in Amsterdam (New York: Penguin Books, 2006). a
young man who ended up entirely outside the usual social groupings
and systems of norms in one of the world’s most developed welfare
systems. The only recognition and the only moral rehabilitation
that Bouyeri seemed able to find was from radical Islamist ideologues
whom he met primarily on the Internet and in Amsterdam. He easily
fell into the role described by Hans Magnus Enzensberger as a ‘radical
loser’51Enzensberger, ‘The Terrorist Mindset – the Radical
Loser’; ibid. – an individual who has found himself outside
‘the collective’ and has nothing to lose, however, extreme the actions
he or she takes. On the contrary, radical, non-democratic action
may be all that can afford the individual some redress and self-esteem.
Here Arendt, Buruma and Enzensberger take the same line, and it
becomes relevant in the South Asian context as well. We find radical
losers among the kar sevaks who tore down the mosque at Ayodhya and those who carried out the
pogroms against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002. In 2010, the 22 year-old
Ajmal Kasab was convicted of the assassinations in Mumbai in 2008.
His background is in several respects like Bouyeri’s.52‘Ajmal
Kasab – School Drop-out to Gunman’, Dawn, 30 April,
2010. But as stated, the personal characteristics of
certain individuals who may become radical losers are not enough
to rock a whole democracy. There has to be an interaction of more
factors. The effect of the actions of radical losers is naturally
also decided by institutional, economic and cultural factors. For
example, political tolerance remains a characteristic cultural trait
in Spain even after the Madrid bombings in 2004.

Conclusions

The diversity of India is not an adequate safeguard against oppression
in India, despite the observation by Paul Brass that India cannot
become a fully-fledged dictatorship because the country is too heterogeneous.
In saying this, Brass challenged Muhammed Ali Jinnah’s theory of
two nations, which propounded the view that the British Empire in
India comprised two great cultures and thus, two nations, the Hindu
and the Muslim. They were destined to go their separate ways. Otherwise,
Muslims would be condemned to live forever under a kind of oppression
of the majority under the Hindu regime. So Brass succeeded to some
extent in undermining Jinnah’s argument by pointing out the great
heterogeneity that is hidden under the lid of the Hindu cauldron.
But I do not believe that Brass wants us to be excessively optimistic
on the strength of his thesis. The argument may very well hold good
as long as many different individuals and groups direct their intolerance
at many different targets at the same time. This creates countervailing pressures
and a kind of equilibrium with everybody keeping each other in check and
therefore, preventing anyone from achieving complete domination.
However, research shows that group identities, alliances and loyalties
are constantly changing and that heterogeneity is not in itself
any guarantee against a tyrannical majority, as James Madison, and
later Jinnah, feared, taking hold of power.

Figure 9.2 may serve to illustrate the two extreme positions
discussed. It is not particularly strange that groups can from within
themselves establish the pluralistic countervailing pressure we
see in the left-hand part of the figure. Groups react, first and
foremost, to the group that is close to them, and if they are competing
for important resources, it is not unusual for this to result in
intolerance. Also sheer fear of strangers may lead different groups
to oppose each other. In certain situations, the intolerance begins
to focus principally on one group in the population. If that process
is allowed to continue, it results eventually in a tyrannical majority as
illustrated by the situation in the right hand part of the Figure.
From this, it is clear that a tyrannical majority can be formed
even though it is not homogeneous in itself. Figure 9.2 also shows
that the tyrannical majority is hardly likely to emerge simply because
individuals and certain groups bear ill feeling towards each other.
Effective oppression of a minority by a majority requires a capacity
for coordination, which is something that many of the radical losers
we mentioned are not particularly good at. In all important respects,
they lack the resources they need in order to coordinate their frustration,
e.g. education and social capital. On the other hand, they constitute
a category of individuals who can be easily mobilized by others,
i.e. by the political elites. In contexts where institutions are
weak or corrupt, there is room for such politicization, and the
institutions may even, as we discussed earlier, accelerate the process.

So if we return to the three actors that we had at the start
in Fig. 1 and simplify everything by imagining two possible positions
for each of the factors, we can illustrate as follows the eight
possible outcomes that may ensue.

Table 9.1: Outcome of combinations of different kinds of elites,
institutions and citizens in pluralist societies53The terms
in Table 9.1 that describe the behaviour of the elites (coalescent
and adversarial) have been taken directly from Arend Lijphart, Democracy
in Plural Societies, New Haven: Yale University Press,
1977.

Well-educated,
tolerant citizens feeling included in the community

Poorly
educated, intolerant citizens feeling excluded from the community

Coalescent
political elite

Populist and
adversarial elite

Coalescent
political elite

Populist and
adversarial elite

Just and efficient institutions

Very good
conditions for
democracy

Good conditions for
democracy

Good conditions for
democracy

Moderate risk of tyrannical
majority

Clientelistic or weak
institutions

Good conditions for
democracy

Moderate risk of tyrannical
majority

Moderate risk of tyrannical
majority

Substantial risk of
tyrannical majority

Table 9.1 shows that all three factors have to reinforce each
other before a worst-case scenario can occur. With one deviant factor,
the tendencies are alleviated and with two, the potential for democracy
soon becomes good in a pluralist setting. For example, even if political
elites aim for a populist message with an adversarial content, the
effects of this are countered by an educated and enlightened population
and strong institutions that oppose injustice. But the picture also
demonstrates that we cannot pin excessive hope on isolated factors
in order to obtain a functioning democracy. For example, literacy
and a higher level of education alone are no panacea. Nor can high
levels of education alone be expected to lead to democracy.54Daron
Acemoglu et al., ‘From Education to Democracy’, American
Economic Review 95, no. 2 (2005). Nor can we
expect that building a large and stronger state by itself will
be enough to strengthen democracy. We must bear in mind the warning
we have had to remind us since Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto
– big bureaucracies in the West tend to first and foremost serve
the prosperous elites. 55See Sullivan et al., op. cit.,
pp. 17–18. They make ‘true’ democracy impossible.56Ibid.

So the answer to the question of whether there can be too much
popular participation in India depends in particular on how elites,
institutions and the citizens and their
characteristics interact in the political process. We have the most
important analytical tools to show us the direction in which a country
like India is moving. However, we do not have enough information
to give a clear picture of the whole country. India’s size, social
and institutional complexity make it difficult to draw conclusions.
It is easy to find depressing examples and tendencies, mainly because
we receive most information about violent events and negative trends.
We create our understanding from the material that has been filtered
by the mass media, the politicians and the debaters. As Stein Rokkan
pointed out in the 1970s, there was a great shortage of reliable
data on countries like India.57S. Rokkan, Stat,
Nasjon, Klasse (Oslo: Universitetsförlaget, Oslo, 1987). Even
if this is to some extent true today, certain positive trends can
be detected with the information that is available now. We can see
how administrative reforms in India have strengthened at least parts
of the country’s administration. The panchayati raj reforms
are an important example. It is no exaggeration to claim that in
the modernization process that India is going through, with increasing
numbers of workers leaving the land and more and more people becoming
unemployed, functioning institutions are becoming ever more important
in order to stabilize the country. The panchayat system appears
to offer a valuable basis for this. As the human capital of India
is growing, it is also becoming increasingly literate, and more
people than before can now influence their own lives. Infant mortality
is falling and life expectancy is rising. The country contains a
huge and poverty-stricken population but the poor are becoming relatively
fewer in relation to other citizens who enjoy reasonable living
conditions. But what about the political elites? Are they becoming
better democrats? The Congress Party needs to become a substantially
more responsive and democratic political institution – there is
no doubt about that. It simply needs to abandon the undemocratic
and dynastic principles it relies on today. Not only to provide
a better chance to win future elections, but also to strengthen
India’s democracy in general. The BJP is the strongest force in
Indian politics at national level and will remain so for a long
time. It needs a real and democratic opposition party, or parties,
in order for the democratic system to evolve in the right direction.
As long as the Congress (I), or strong regional parties, do not
find a way to cooperate and present the electorate with viable and
credible strategies against corruption and pollution, and with economic
reforms that create jobs, then it is mainly the BJP that decides
if India’s democracy will continue a path towards the upper left,
or lower right corner, in Table 9.1.

Lipset, Seymour Martin. ‘Some Social Requisites of Democracy
– Economic Development and Political Legitimacy.’ The American
Political Science Review 53, no. 1 (1959): 69–105.

Madison, James. ‘The Structure of the Government Must Furnish
the Proper Checks and Balances between the Different Departments.’ The
Federalist no. No. 51 (1788). http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa51.htm.

A big ‘thank you’
to Sven Oskarsson, Frida Widmalm, and Bernard Vowles for creative
suggestions and comments on this text. Also to the members of the
working group ‘Dysfunktioner i statsapparaten’ [Dysfunctions in
the apparatus of state], which met at the annual conference of the
Swedish Political Science Association, 2010. I am also grateful
for the financial support from the Swedish Research Council and
the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA).
Finally, this author is also very grateful for the impressive efforts
made by the editors of this book to publish this manuscript.

By
political elite, in this chapter and in this context, I mainly refer
to leaders of political parties that win elections, bureaucrats
and military officers positioned at high levels of authority within their
own organizations, and representatives of large commercial interests
and businesses. For an intriguing discussion on the theoretical
aspects of the concept, see Alan Zuckerman, ‘The Concept “Political
Elite” – Lessons from Mosca and Pareto’ The Journal of Politics 39,
no. 2 (1977).

Sten Widmalm, Political Tolerance
in the Global South – Images from India, Pakistan and Uganda (London:
Ashgate, 2016 [in press]); Samuel A. Stouffer, Communism,
Conformity, and Civil Liberties – a Cross-Section of the Nation
Speaks Its Mind (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, [1955] 1963);
John L. Sullivan, James Piereson, and George E. Marcus, Political
Tolerance and American Democracy (Chicago and London: The
University of Chicago Press, 1982); James Gibson and Amanda Gouws, Overcoming
Intolerance in South Africa: Experiments in Democratic Persuasion (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

James
Madison, ‘The Structure of the Government Must Furnish the Proper
Checks and Balances between the Different Departments,’ The
Federalist no. No. 51 (1788), http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa51.htm.
Access date 2013-10-02.

One does
not have to be a Marxist to ask where capital and the companies
are placed in this model. Obviously, economic development plays
a big part in the development of tolerance or conflict. But in this
model, it is implicitly present as an underlying factor that influences
and directs individuals, political elites, and the actions of the
state, even if they can act autonomously. Other such underlying
factors are historical context, cultural values, position in the greater
international political context, etc.

The Narmada project
is actually a number of projects that include dams to be built along
the River Narmada in the states of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and
Gujarat. More about popular protests in India can be found in Katrin
Uba, ‘Do Protests Make a Difference? – the Impact of Anti-Privatisation
Mobilisation in India and Peru’ (Uppsala University, 2007).

The terms
in Table 9.1 that describe the behaviour of the elites (coalescent
and adversarial) have been taken directly from Arend Lijphart, Democracy
in Plural Societies, New Haven: Yale University Press,
1977.